Sometimes, the comfort you need is found in a song from God.
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Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada with a song to comfort you today.
One time, my mother and I went to The Cove, a Christian retreat center in the Smoky Mountains. It’s so beautiful, a majestic two-story cabin that serves as the main house. Upstairs, a cozy corner with couches and a big fireplace. That day, a quadriplegic named Bruce wanted to meet with me there. And we thought that that cozy area would make a good place for two wheelchairs. Bruce had broken his neck in a motorcycle accident a year earlier, and he had things he wanted to talk to me about. So, my mother and I sat and listened. The atmosphere outside the cabin windows was cold and gray, but the air around our fireplace was warm and cheery. But things dampened a bit as he shared more of his story. Before his accident Bruce had been a successful dentist. But now, with no use of his hands, he had lost his career. He was a Christian and wanted so very much to trust God, but as he opened up, I realized his biggest problem was not his wheelchair. No his wife had moved out a few weeks earlier and he was facing legal and financial problems, as well as the normal baggage of adjusting to quadriplegia.
“This stuff isn’t easy,” he sighed. And I sighed with him, understanding at least some of what he meant. I turned to my eighty-four-year-old mother, sitting on the couch. She was nodding knowingly. She, too, was a battle-scarred veteran of pain and loss. “Learning to trust God doesn’t happen all at once,” I told Bruce. “Trust happens in small steps, tiny steps of radical obedience in small, little things. I call it ‘drastic trust.’ It’s when your mind and emotions try their best to sweep you away from the Word of God. But in the flood of feelings, you grab hold of an anchor, like Psalm 62:8, ‘Trust the Lord in all things.’ And that includes little things, even if the victory is only a smile. Or not complaining for one day. Or putting up your sails so that God can move you forward.” I repeated to Bruce what had been for me my own anchor, “Psalm 62:8, ‘Trust the Lord in all things.’” At the end of the visit, after we had talked about our disabilities and taken photos, we huddled closer to the fire to pray. That’s when my mother spoke up for the first time. She had been listening to our conversation and so she offered up to us and to the Lord the following song.
Looking into the fire, she sang to Bruce, “I do not know why oft around me, my hopes all shattered seem to be; God’s perfect plan I cannot see, but someday I’ll understand: Someday he’ll make it plain to me, someday when I his face shall see. Someday from tears I shall be free, for someday I shall understand…” My mom was not a seminary graduate or a Bible student. But she glorified God in her song. And, oh, was Bruce comforted. God’s glory is the radiance of his attributes that break forth in visible ways around us. And that day by the fire, my mother was God’s mirror— reflecting the light of God’s comfort into our hearts. Second Corinthians 1 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.” And sometimes that comfort is just a song.
© Joni and Friends